


Konoha Guide to Abandoned Places

by ThisCatastrophe



Category: Naruto
Genre: Abandonment, F/M, Gardens & Gardening, Growing Up, Hurt/Comfort, Personal Growth, References to Depression, Self-Discovery, Slice of Life, Summer Romance, Workplace Relationship, World Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-29
Updated: 2018-07-29
Packaged: 2019-06-18 06:18:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 12,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15479478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThisCatastrophe/pseuds/ThisCatastrophe
Summary: Sakura can't forget about Sasuke.It's the middle of summer and she's feeling abandoned. All that keeps her afloat is the hope that Sasuke will send her a letter sometime soon, but that hasn't happened in months. She can only throw herself into her work.Though at least she has an unlikely friend to rely on.(ShinoSaku hurt/comfort slice of life. Some sad teens watching summer roll by and figuring themselves out.)





	1. Chrysalis

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2018 Naruto Gift Exchange, for [abalonetea](http://abalonetea.tumblr.com/) on tumblr. This was a good time to work on.
> 
> Chrysalis: a quiescent insect pupa, especially of a butterfly or moth. The hard outer case of this, especially after being discarded. A preparatory or transitional state.

Black, with a shiny carapace. Six legs, segmented, thick with meat near the body and terminating in tiny claws at the toes and elbows. A grey ring around the throat, reflective green eyes, mandibles.

It skitters in tight circles on the back of Sakura’s hand, and she shrieks.

Leeches are one thing. You need leeches sometimes. All med-nin know that. And the therapeutic bugs, the ones with the long, pointed proboscides, those are a necessary evil.

The beetles are not welcome.

She swats at it frantically, nearly upsetting a bowl of water on the nearby examination table, and whirls to fling the insect at a wall. Dislodged, it buzzes away to land on a ceiling tile, where it folds its wings in an almost self-satisfied fashion.

“Oh, no way,” she grumbles. “Not in my office, you don’t.” Sakura leans down to remove a shoe, then holds it precariously by the heel as she aims for the ceiling. One dead bug on a tile—gross, sure, but it’s much better than a beetle flying around the room for who-knows-how-long. All it takes is one well-aimed throw and—

“Sakura.”

With a start, she drops the shoe. “Ah—oh, who’s—?”

Shino Aburame stands in the doorway, head ducked and hands deep in his pockets. In the afternoon light he looks like a movie villain, shadowed and shrouded, and Sakura can’t help but stiffen, even if the man is a friend.

“Shino! Wait, this isn’t… is that one of yours?” She gestures at the beetle, now rubbing a foreleg over its head as if it owns the place.

“Correct.” He doesn’t wait; Shino steps inside and around her examination table, reaching up towards the ceiling. The beetle lifts its wing casings and flutters in a tight spiral down to his hand, disappearing into his shirtsleeve after a short rest on the back of his hand. “I apologize. The reason it was in here was that I wanted to see whose chakra I still felt in the building.”

With the insect gone, the animal instinct in Sakura says to relax, but the shinobi mind recalls that Shino might be comprised of slightly more bugs than human parts. “Well,” she remarks, apprehensive, “I usually stay a little later on Fridays, since I’m not always around for the entire week…” Her files and messenger bag are conveniently still on her beat-up metal desk, tucked in the corner on the opposite side of the room, and she retreats to them to be farther from the source of the insects.

“Hm. How dedicated of you.”

“Was that… was that sarcasm?”

Shino tips his head, almost imperceptibly, to one side, as if she’s asked timidly asked if he frequently bursts into spontaneous flame. “Why would—”

“—nevermind!” she cries. “Well, listen—” a sudden pause as she sneaks a glance out the window, “I’m just about to leave, so I’m sorry to bother you! You’re welcome to stay—Lady Tsunade gave you a key, right? For the research lab and the side door? I left some calorie bars in the cabinet if you need—”

“—I don’t think there will be a letter from Sasuke today.”

Sakura’s voice dies in her throat. Quietly, with only the shifting noise of his jacket, Shino steps beside her to look at the window before continuing. “The hawks don’t usually go into the civilian districts. Just to the bigger clan houses. That’s why you stay here late on Fridays. It’s because you’re waiting for a letter.”

The air leaves her lungs slowly, and she feels her shoulders curve, heavy and sore from work, stress, an ache deeper than the medical terms she can apply to it. “Huh. Well, you figured it out, I guess.”

“It wasn’t hard to do.”

Sakura watches the light reflect off Shino’s dark glasses before shoving her files into the worn leather bag. “Not hard to do, huh.” There’s a smugness she finds in his words, one that she resents, but her heart feels too heavy in its cage for her to protest. “I’ve got to go. See you later, Shino,” she murmurs.

“Sakura—”

Before Shino can complete his thought, Sakura is out the door. It shuts behind her with a soft click, and her steps retreat slowly down the hallway.

He waits for a moment for any straggler hawks, then checks that his beetles have left the room. Only then does Shino decide to go home.

* * *

 

“Shino?”

It’s still early in the evening, one of the late, bright afternoons in the height of summer, but everyone else has gone home for the day, eager to escape the sticky heat of the hospital. Everyone but the two youngest employees, holed up in their respective offices late into an otherwise lazy Wednesday afternoon.

Shino looks up from his desk, placing a finger delicately before one of his beetles as it moves away from the latest tissue sample. In his doorway is Sakura, shaking the tie-dents out of her hair and fumbling with her bag, looking almost desperately nonchalant--far too posed, he thinks. “Is there something you needed?” he asks.

“I was just thinking,” she comments, “maybe we should both head out? Come on, I’ll treat you to… um.” A pause; she examines his desk as well as she can over his shoulder, watching the beetles with clear apprehension and avoiding a glance at his tank of medicinal maggots. “Whatever it is that you like eating.”

He looks back at the tissue sample, at the beetle (Hatsuko, with her little pale stripes on her wing casings) that keeps trying to step over his finger. It’s been hours since he stood up. His writing hand cramped up long before that. Even the beetles don’t want to keep working; Hatsuko spreads her wings and threatens to flutter away from her job, while the other two workers look as if they want to crawl under the desk to escape.

“I suppose a break couldn’t hurt.”

“Wh—”

He stands up, stretching his back a little and rolling his shoulders as Hatsuko, Hasumi and Hana buzz in celebratory circles around him. In the doorway, he catches a glimpse of a surprised Sakura, her bag hanging limp from her shoulder, pink hair a mess around her face. “You’re really going to come eat with me? Just like that?” she asks.

Shino crouches to retrieve his personal effects from under the table, passing the spare glasses, plastic gloves, granola wrappers and empty water bottle over a shoulder and into the slim pack affixed to the back of his jacket. “I don’t see why not,” he responds. “Did you expect to be turned down?”

“Well…” Sakura ruffles her hair once more and smiles at him, apologetic. “Sort of. You don’t seem like the dinner-after-work type, Shino.”

“Hm.” He stands and joins her in the doorway, rummaging in his pocket for his keyring. “I will pay for my own dinner, in that case.”

Sakura’s hands fly up, flapping back and forth wildly. “No, no, no!” she cries. “I’ll still pay! Let me pay for it, it’s my treat!”

“You did not expect me to join you. I should pay for my own, in that case—”

“—Shino!” Her hands clap sharply on his biceps with a grip much tighter than he expected. Under his shirt, the beetles move uneasily, ready for a fight. “You’re new here and you don’t talk to anybody else, and we were in the same Academy class and we still barely talk, and…”

“And you’re lonely?”

She sighs. “Yes. I’m lonely. Please let me buy your dinner.”

Shino locks his door and follows Sakura down the hall as the cicadas outside call to their mates.

* * *

 

“Naruto has been busy lately, hasn’t he? And with Sasuke gone...” he comments, tipping his head back to watch the clouds roll across the sky.

Sakura leans her head on a palm, picking at her chilly somen noodles with the restaurant’s cheap wooden chopsticks. “Everyone’s busy in their own ways.” She lifts a pair of noodles delicately and dips them in thin ginger sauce, watching the salmon-pink flavor soak in. “Ino’s been working with her dad in the Interrogation department, Shikamaru is… doing whatever it is he does in general, Naruto’s constantly on one mission or another… and of course, Sasuke never writes.”

Hasumi and Hana nibble at an abandoned slice of celery just underneath Shino’s plate; Shino himself crunches thoughtfully on a spinach leaf as he watches Sakura’s noodles slowly disappear. “I understand how you feel,” he comments. “I, too, feel lonely much of the time.”

She gives him a look, shadows under her eyes and a little quirk in her smile. “Y’don’t say.”

“Please don’t remind me that I’m a forgettable person.”

The plate of somen nearly winds up on the ground, and Shino’s beetles flee their celery slice, seeking the shelter of a sleeve. “Shino! I didn’t mean it like that!” Sakura steadies her dinner and stops slapping the table, ignoring the stares from customers nearby. “You’re not forgettable, you’re just…”

“A wallflower?”

“Yes! That!”

“That’s the same thing as being forgettable.”

She sighs deeply and closes her eyes for a long moment before shifting a bit of her noodles onto his plate, retreating with one of his cherry tomatoes. “I really didn’t mean to call you forgettable, Shino.”

“I know you didn’t.” Shino picks up a tiny glob of wasabi from the condiment plate and taps it on the somen noodles before picking them up. “You aren’t a mean person. Rough around the edges, maybe, but not cruel.”

There’s a long silence broken only by the gentle splash of fish in a small pond nearby, migratory birds and cheap plates and cups rattling in a server’s dishbin. “What else do you think about me?” Sakura murmurs. “Not… um, don’t read into that too much. I just want to know what other people see me as.”

Reiko crawls out of Shino’s jacket, shy as ever, and wiggles her antennae at the sun. He watches her slow path along his hand, rotating his wrist just enough to keep her upright on her path to his fingers. “Intelligent, but with low self-confidence. It’s been improving slowly. Resilient, determined and principled. And ever since we were children, strangely unfulfilled.”

A waiter passes silently with a pitcher of water, ignoring them in favor of a noisy crowd of mothers near the back of the patio. Sakura slumps into her chair and furrows her brow with a bemused smile. “That’s way too accurate,” she grouses. “You’re pretty observant, aren’t you?”

“It comes with the territory, I suppose.” He drops his hand gently to the tabletop and watches Reiko descend onto the lacquered wood. “Though I like to think most shinobi are fairly observant.”

Sakura snorts and taps her chopsticks against the plate. “You’d be surprised. Once I watched Naruto walk straight into a trap he’d set up himself no more than five minutes ago. And this other time—you know Kankuro, from the Hidden Sand? Oh, he was your… well, when I was taking care of him after he was poisoned, he mentioned that he sometimes poisons himself on his puppets while he’s working on them, isn’t that just… the dumbest thing? And when Ino was a kid—”

Reiko, in a quick bout of courage, hops onto Sakura’s hand.

She flaps her hand as if it’s scalded, crying out in surprise and tucking her limbs in close. The beetle is flung off and into the air (thankfully, opening her wings in the process and buzzing off to a safe spot on Shino’s outstretched palm), and Sakura’s chair tips backwards just far enough to dump her on the floor. A waiter and two tables of old couples look their way, expressions varying between “startled” and “annoyed.”

In a split second, Sakura’s back on her feet, dusting herself off and picking stray grass clippings from her clothes, bowing furiously to the grandmothers who scowl at her from the nearby tables. Shino watches Reiko as she scurries in tight rings before vanishing, petrified, into his shirt to find her kin.

“Sakura,” he comments, ignoring all of her apologies and the anxious laughter, “I’d like to show you something, if you don’t mind.”

* * *

 

The dim streetlights don’t illuminate the street as well as they should. A flowering vine spills over a wooden fence, casting even deeper shadows on the two shinobi as Shino gently prods through the leaves. “Should we really be here?” Sakura hisses, craning her neck to catch a glimpse of the darkened house beyond the fence.

“It’s not a problem,” he responds. “We won’t be long. I know she’s around somewhere.”

“She?”

A handful of leaves rustle, and a great shadow meanders through the sparse light of the lanterns. Sakura squeaks and bumps into Shino’s arm, watching the shadow bobble about unsteadily, trying to find what might be casting it.

“That’s her,” he says, resting a steady hand on her shoulder. “Hold out your palm, Sakura.”

The shadow continues to waver through the air as if looking for a roost. Sakura eyes it for a little bit longer before scowling at Shino, one hand clenched into a fist. “Better not make me stop trusting you, Aburame.”

But she holds out her hand all the same.

A gentle weight settles in the palm of her outstretched hand. Vast wings dust against her fingers, rustling as the creature makes itself comfortable in the hollow of her palm. Sakura watches as a pattern appears in the calming wings: rust red fields, white triangles, recurved yellow wingtips and little buff circles that line the edges of each massive appendage. Feathered antennae slip across her wrist, and she holds back a surprised giggle.

“She hatched two days ago,” Shino comments. “And she’s the largest moth in the Land of Fire.” He holds his own hand over the moth in comparison; her wingtips are visible even past his spread fingers, and Sakura’s hand is blocked from sight entirely. “In my opinion, one of the most beautiful, as well.”

Sakura considers touching the moth’s broad, vivid wings. They look so delicate, she thinks, and so smooth, but she doesn’t trust her hand to leave the creature uninjured. “She _is_ beautiful,” she agrees in a hushed tone.

The moth sets off again, circling Sakura’s hair as if drawn to the powdery color, reminded of her home in the flowers of some civilian’s garden. It settles on her forehead, brittle legs clinging to a lock of hair, wings leaving scale and dust behind on her forehead protector.

Shino lifts a hand to the moth’s feelers and lets it examine his fingertips. “I wanted to show you how pretty she is,” he whispers, careful not to spook their guest. “But I also wanted to ask you a favor.”

“A favor?”

The moth steps from Sakura’s hair to Shino’s hand, crawling slowly to his wrist, wings twitching to keep balance on the sharp bone at the base of his palm. Just below her, one of Shino’s beetles emerges from his jacket, darting under the moth’s great wings to stand like a tiny lookout on Shino’s extended forefinger. “My kikaichu,” Shino begins, “are not as pretty as some other insects. But please don’t hold that against them. They are more than their appearances.”

She watches the beetle wave its front legs at her, reaching, and watches the moth as it flutters its heavy, awkward wings against Shino’s sleeve. Still those vibrant reds and oranges are more enticing, but there’s something endearing about the beckoning feet and the intelligent green eyes. Even if it is just a beetle.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she murmurs.

They wait for the moth to fly back to its home in the vines before parting ways. High in the sky, the moon shines perfectly silver, a fragment of dazzling light in an otherwise dusky, navy-blue night. Sakura watches it all the way home before it drifts behind a cloud, dropping Konoha into a warm darkness.


	2. Exoskeleton

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Exoskeleton: a rigid external covering for the body in some invertebrate animals, especially arthropods, providing both support and protection.

“So with your beetles—”

“Kikaichu.”

“Kikaichu. With those, and with Kiba’s sense of smell and Hinata’s Byakugan… does anything get past your team?”

“Not many things.” 

The two sit together, legs crossed, on the bank of the lazy river that cuts through the north of Konoha. From above them, on the cobbled path cutting through a grassy park, they can hear the shouts and calls of food vendors as they peddle leftover festival wares to housewives and the children still too young to attend school. Every so often, a batch of okonomiyaki fizzles on a skillet, cutting through the indistinct noises of civilians and youngsters.

Between their knees sits a shallow paper cup stacked with pork yakitori and skewered grilled zucchini, peppers and eggplant (“Crowd favorites in Suna,” the vendor claimed), and on each of their laps sit twin taiyaki, each wrapped loosely and cooling; Sakura reaches out for a skewer of meat and picks a slice off with her teeth. She chews thoughtfully as she considers her steaming chocolate-filled taiyaki, warming her thigh through wax paper.

“So I bet you three go on a lot of tracking missions,” she muses. A tiny breeze ruffles her hair, and she looks north, examining the tops of trees.

Shino drops his spent skewer into their basket, then pushes a pair of pork skewers aside in search of the last veggie selection. “We did for a while. Hinata doesn’t get assigned to away missions often."

He pauses, almost imperceptibly, then continues. “Also, there will not be any letters from Sasuke today.”

Sakura splutters and drops her pork yakitori into the grass. A delegation of beetles creep from Shino’s sleeve and settle on the meat, tearing at the sticky skin with tiny black jaws. “The reason is that there’s not enough wind high up today. A hawk won’t fly as well without a jet stream.”

“I wasn’t looking for a letter this time!” Sakura cries. One hand grabs at her taiyaki, saving it from dropping to the ground, while the other swats at Shino’s arm. “Don’t be so mean!”

“Please stop—”

“—if you keep teasing me, I’ll start teasing you!”

“—Sakura, please stop hitting me—”

“Hey, and your kikaichu are eating my lunch.” Sakura leans forward to snatch Shino’s taiyaki from his lap; before he can protest, she takes a huge bite of it, dripping a glob of sweet potato filling onto the grass. “‘M gonna eat yours, then.”

She watches as one of the beetles (Yukari? Yukimaru, maybe?) abandons the pork in favor of the sweet potato filling. Even though this one is just a baby—each beetle lives no more than a day, Shino claims—she’s learned its personality, how it differs from its relatives, the way it moves quicker than the others. Each tiny black pinpoint is a miniature life. 

“Sakura…”

Right, Shino. She looks up from the beetles, holding the stolen taiyaki out for the taking—

His face is dusted with a pale pink, just the slightest twinge of color, and his eyebrows furrow deeply. “Please stop teasing me.”

“Oh, wow.” Sakura passes the taiyaki back with a wry smile. “So you  _ do _ have emotions, huh?”

The pale pink vanishes in favor of a scowl, and Shino turns away with his snack. Yukari-Yukimaru—maybe this is just Yuu—skitters up to Sakura’s hand and twitches its antennae, begging for gentle strokes along its tough shell.

Long minutes pass in relative silence. Slowly, the rest of the food is split between the shinobi or offered to Shino’s beetles. The weak breeze dies down and leaves the river glassy-still, reflecting back the midday sun; they’ve been at lunch for long enough.

Sakura stands and, after a moment of consideration, offers her hand to Shino. “We should get back to work,” she comments, more to the grass than to him. “Come on, let’s start walking.”

He takes her hand, squeezing gently as Sakura pulls him to his feet.

* * *

“I don’t know.” Sakura takes a long sip of coffee, heated in a kettle many hours after its original brew, and watches her feet as they dangle off the edge of Shino’s work table. “I just don’t feel good lately.”

“I understand,” Shino comments. A medicinal leech, grown in a chakra-infused egg, crawls over his fingers, seeking out the tissue samples that he shields from its sight; its training is slow and tedious, and Sakura’s glad that someone else is assigned to the task.

She sets the coffee aside and folds her heavy hands in her lap. “Well, thanks for understanding.” Sakura watches the leech out of the corner of her eye, almost too tired to be disgusted. “Naruto always just says that I’m really cheerful and I can’t be sad if I act like that, and Ino just… doesn’t get it, somehow.”

Some part of her imagines what Sasuke would have done; he’d stand slowly, towering over her, and gently take her face in his hands. It wouldn’t even be romantic, the way their foreheads touch—it would be sweet and understanding, as if to make their psyches meld together through their foreheads. He’d tell her everything is alright. She’s beautiful and strong and—

“You’ll pull through.” Shino looks up at her for a second before turning his face back to the leech, munching on healthy tissue instead of the diseased sample nearby. It’s failed the test for the third time in a row, and he plucks it from the tissue sample to replace it in its tank. “Sadness is a part of life. It’s a reality of shinobi existence.” He stands and pushes his chair in. “I am going to get a granola bar. Would you like me to reheat your coffee?”

She’s beautiful and strong and she needs warmer coffee and maybe some men who are more like Sasuke. “Sure. That… that would be great.”

Shino exits quietly with her coffee cup in hand, and Sakura wonders if her daydreams apply to Sasuke, either.

* * *

 

Dinner tonight was a bad idea.

Sakura, over the course of the day, had assisted in four surgeries (two of which were back-to-back procedures), cleaned three operating theaters and prescribed enough allergy medicine to outpatients to keep the entirety of Konoha sniffle-free for years. By the way Shino’s beetles avoid her open hand, his day clearly hasn’t been much better.

But even so, a dinner agreement is a dinner agreement. The new yakisoba place in the southtown district won’t try itself out. So even with drawn faces and only a few pleasantries, the two weave through the Friday-night crowds and advance down the north-south avenue outside the hospital.

The service is slow; Shino seems content enough to watch little Tsukimi run circles on the table, but Sakura has to keep reminding herself how new the shop is. At least it isn’t crowded. Where is the waiter?

Thirty minutes into their wait, she glances out the window to see their waiter, who’s smoking outside the front entrance. Sakura feels creases appearing in her forehead.

“Tsukimi seems pretty energetic,” she comments, trying to lighten her own mood. The beetle climbs over Shino’s extended fingers and explores the greasy bottle of soy sauce on their table.

“She didn’t have anything to do today,” Shino replies. “She’s still too young to help.”

“And by work on Monday, she’ll be long gone.”

Shino drums his fingers gently on the table. “As they say, ashes to ashes.”

“You’re not sad about that?”

He looks up, the corners of his mouth tight, little creases showing under his dark glasses. “I am sad about it. My insects are like family to me.”

Sakura tosses her hair and frowns out the window at the waiter, who’s now chewing the end of his cigarette and picking at his nails. “I’ll buy you a drink,” she offers. “Make you feel better.”

“I don’t drink.”

She gives a long, weary sigh. “Don’t drink, don’t smoke… what do you do? Anything fun?”

With a faint buzz, Tsukimi alights on her hand. “You’re teasing again,” Shino comments.

“Come on, that’s not teasing.” For once, her Inner Sakura shakes her head; what kind of day has she had that her rowdy inner thoughts aren’t on board with her exterior? But this line of conversation is a runaway train, and the same urge that scratches at scabs and overthinks past arguments prompts her further: “How’s this for teasing?”

And she reaches for Shino’s glasses.

Gently, he pushes her hand away. “Stop that.” Once again, the pink color rises in his cheeks, almost too subtly to be noticed. “I have brown eyes and short eyelashes, if that is what you wanted to know.”

“Seeing is believing. Come on, Shino.” She presses his hand to the table and reaches out with the other.

“Sakura.” Shino leans back in his chair and turns his face away from her grasp. “Really.”

Tsukimi pinches the back of her hand suddenly, and her arm jerks away from his face just as Shino stands. The beetle flutters into his sleeve as quickly as it can. Around them, the near-empty restaurant is silent.

“I’m going to go home,” Shino says. He turns abruptly and exits, ignoring her calls and protests.

Five minutes later, their food arrives. Sakura eats slowly and boxes Shino’s food to take with; maybe one of his relatives will hand it over to him tomorrow morning.

She tries to take Shino’s advice: it’ll be okay. But it hurts to push a friend to their limits.


	3. Mandible

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mandible: the jaw or a jawbone, especially the lower jawbone in mammals and fishes. Either of the upper and lower parts of a bird's beak. Either half of the crushing organ in an arthropod's mouthparts.

All weekend and no word from Shino.

It’s not like Sakura expects anything. Shino’s not a friend who shows up at someone’s doorstep at the crack of dawn with a smile and a coupon to the village’s best dango stand. It’s normal not to hear from him all weekend unless their paths cross in town.

An anxious energy keeps her up all Friday night. What did she do? Will everything be alright? She cleans her room in the dead of night and tries to quiet the questions.

Sakura manages a single hour of sleep just before sunrise. Hands shaking, she drops a book of ticket stubs and mission reports, precious memories that scatter all over the floor, and before she can kick herself for the offense she collapses into bed, asleep before the pillow curls over her ears. A fragmented dream: Sasuke’s face, breaking apart into a million beetles. She wakes with unfallen tears in her eyes and quietly leaves before her parents wake.

The sun rises over Konoha as she scuffs her shoes through the city streets. Shino’s father, unreadable and silent, takes her boxed-up food at the Aburame family’s gate. He nods gently and turns before she can ask questions; behind him, nobody else waits in the courtyard. All weekend, her errands bring her on round trips near the compound, her conscious steps taking her farther away again and again. 

Sunday night fades away, hazy and hot. Well, it’s normal not to see your coworkers on the weekends, especially someone as reserved as Shino. Sakura falls asleep with a promise to herself—you’re overthinking it—on her lips, and dreams of Sasuke’s soft black hair and comforting smile.

But Monday, that’s abnormal. No beetles show up in her office with tiny notes—“I would like to have soba for lunch,” or “Would you like some leftover winter melon soup?”—and Shino doesn’t appear in her office near break time. He doesn’t wait for her to finish her shift, silently watching his youngest insects explore the palm of his hand. When she passes his makeshift lab on errands, his door is shut.

Tuesday. Well, he’s a quiet person. It’s nothing to be concerned with. She keeps her head down and manages to finish work early.

Wednesday. Naruto shows up—surprising, considering he’s several weeks early off a mission. They sit side by side at the Ichiraku counter, listening to each others’ stories. His are long and grand and hilarious. Hers are shorter and shorter every time. The cries for help die on her tongue—how do you tell Sunshine Embodied, the little boy who never fell out of love, that you wake up sick to your stomach over some feeling you can’t pin down? Eventually she falls silent and lets him finish off her noodles; she’s too busy methodically breaking apart a fishcake.

“You’re lost in thought lately,” he comments after lunch is over. “What an intelligent person, you!” And he and his silver-linings outlook run off to check in with Lady Fifth. 

Hawks criss-cross the city like telephone wire, carried gentle and easy on thermals. None of their letters are for her. Even with company she stares after them far too often; without company? She’s lost. Adrift, waiting for a letter in a bottle.

This won’t do.

She stops by the Yamanaka shop after work.

* * *

 

“Sakura?”

She didn’t know Shino woke up so early. Especially on a weekend.

The empty lot next to the hospital is torn up as if a shovel-wielding hurricane struck overnight. Half of the existing turf sits in a pile shoved up against the wooden fence that separates the lot from the hospital’s lawn; a mud-encrusted shovel, once leaned up against a post by the entry, now lies across the fence-gap that leads into the lot. 

“Oh, Shino!” Sakura perks up from her place near the entrance, brushing dirt from her palms and shaking a stray strand of pink hair from her face. “Did you get that food I gave to your dad? Um, and are you…?”

He enters the lot and looks around, touching the dying leaves of an uprooted mountain asparagus atop a stack of ripped-up bushes. “When did you start this project?”

“Just this morning. I got up early.” She stands and shakes a handful of tiny rocks out of her skirt. “I… Shino, can we sit down for a minute?”

A book lands in her hands with a puff of dust.

“What?”

On the cover is a complicated illustration of a dragonfly wing, dazzling and iridescent, which reflects a woman’s eye. Sakura runs a dusty finger over the raised letters of the cover:  _ Red Sun Chronicle _ , by an author whose name she can’t begin to pronounce.

Before she can ask any other questions, Shino cuts her off. “I wanted to apologize.” His hands link together across his stomach, fingers gripping into each other, uncharacteristically anxious. “The reason is that I’ve been avoiding you since last Friday.”

“Oh.” She hesitates for a moment before tucking the book under her arm. “Well… I suppose I should apologize too, then. You asked me to stop teasing you, and…”

“... that’s my favorite book,” Shino comments. “I thought you would enjoy it, too.” That pale pink, the color of early spring flowers, decorates his face once again. “If you want to read it, I’d like to discuss it.”

She can feel it. Her smile is dazzling like the sun; it’s the first time she’s felt anything close to beautiful in months.

“Want to come grab a snack with me?”

* * *

 

The sun beats down on Konoha, and they rest in the shade of a tree whose branches peek over the fence from another yard nearby. Beetles crawl over an abandoned convenience-store strawberry; Sakura watches them quietly, leans her shoulder against Shino’s and plays her fingernails along the edge of an empty plastic container, half-buried in the mercifully-untouched patch of grass. 

“I needed something to keep my mind off Sasuke,” she whispers. Such a still afternoon demands low voices, and Shino doesn’t question this assessment. “I think about him so often. Maybe he’ll send me a letter today, or tomorrow, or…”  

“Do you think he dream about you?”

It’s not a cruel question, but she feels the characteristic prickle of active tear ducts.

“What the heart thinks and what the mind thinks… two different things, Shino.” She brushes stray dirt from the cover of the book in her lap, following the path of a tiny beetle with her eyes. 

Clouds roll across the sun, shading the entire lot in a smooth, grey patch. Shino stands, hesitates, and unbuttons the high collar of his jacket with tentative hands. “You said you bought butterfly bushes, correct?”

“You’re changing the subject,” Sakura says. She climbs to her feet just in time to watch Shino’s jacket crumple to the ground, revealing sweat-damp pale arms, a slim figure, bandages around biceps and rumples in fabric around a narrow waist. “They’re over here. Help me move one, okay?”

* * *

 

Shino looks different when he’s working in a garden. He looks different with muddy hand prints wiped across his shoulder. Strange, how much he hid behind the heavy jacket, how vulnerable he looks now, how out of his element. 

But he looks best smiling, exhausted, watching tiny blue butterflies inspect the honey-sweet pink flowers that fill the empty lot.

They pack sod-clumps down as a makeshift grass path through the garden’s center—surely there was an easier way to do this, but Sakura just hopes that Ino won’t stop by the hospital to see the mess they’ve made. Shino scouts worms from the nearby lots, brings them over in handfuls that vanish into the soft dirt around the bush bases. Water gets dumped on sweaty hair, shirts are ruined and mud is forced into the creases of skin.

She laughs. She cries a little, afterwards, and Shino sits beside her with no kind words to offer.

They carry away dead weeds in armfulls. Two soba shops and a barbeque place turn them away via wrinkle-nosed hosts. They eat greasy takeout on the curb and listen for the night birds that migrate between Suna and Konoha.

Sakura reads his book at home. It’s a meandering story with a meaning that’s beyond her. But she puts away a chapter before checking the window for a last midnight hawk.


	4. Aphid, Beetle, Butterfly

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aphid: a minute bug that feeds by sucking sap from plants.  
> Beetle: an insect of an order distinguished by forewings typically modified into hard wing cases (elytra) that cover and protect the hind wings and abdomen.  
> Butterfly: an insect with two pairs of large wings that are covered with tiny scales, usually brightly colored, and typically held erect when at rest. Informal: a fluttering and nauseated sensation felt in the stomach when one is nervous.

“Mama,” she says, “what do you think of this line?”

Sakura lies on her stomach, hair tied in a knot at the top of her skull. Shino’s book sits propped open against the leg of the low living room table, stuffed full of notes and pencil markings and cardstock bookmarks. “‘The thing about her hands,’” Sakura begins, “‘is that they were meant for gentle touches that linger on the sharp peaks of knuckles. Her lips draw tight into a quivering, anxious line, but the heat of her palms… oh, he had never known glory.’ What do you think?”

Her mother sighs, leaning against the kitchen doorway, folding a dishtowel with weary hands. “It’s very nice, dear. What book is this, again?” 

“ _ Red Sun Chronicle _ .” She reaches up onto the table, prodding about blind for the dish of pine nuts, eyes glued to the book. “And it’s not that it’s nice, it’s just… I don’t know. Do you think it means anything? I mean, it can’t… it can’t just be a romance novel.”

“It certainly  _ can _ just be a romance novel.”

Sakura scoffs and rolls onto her back, taking the novel with her. “Not when it’s Shino’s favorite book,” she mumbles.

From outside the open window, early cicadas chirp. Their calls float in on a breeze that ruffles a set of thin cream curtains. Sakura pauses her reading just long enough to glance at the sky; she tells herself it’s a love for the soft white clouds of a perfect, shade-dappled afternoon, but the shame of abandonment sets in anyway.

* * *

 

Shino glances at his jacket sleeve and finds a note stuck to it.

_ Possible reference to Ballad of the Warring States? _ , reads the scrawl. He plucks it from his clothing and turns it over.

“This book is really dense,” Sakura mutters. Her chin sits on his desk, arms splayed in front of her and the copy of  _ Red Sun Chronicle _ open over her head like a peaked cap. A pair of beetles chase each other in circles on her open palm. “I keep rereading parts and I’m not sure I understand anything that’s going on.”

“Really?” Shino sets the note on top of the book, hoping it won’t fall to the floor. “I always read it as I’m falling asleep. That’s because it comforts me.”

Sakura turns her head to stare at him, dropping the book into the space between her shoulder and cheek. She chews at an interior corner of her lip and huffs in frustration. “You would say that.”

There is no response from Shino. Unbothered, the beetles run from Sakura’s hand to their master’s arm, creeping up the crisp folds of his sleeve. Faint pink colors Shino’s ears and cheeks, though Sakura couldn’t blame the conversation over the sticky heat, oppressive, cutting through the fan-cooled sanctuary of the insect therapy lab. One more time: Shino sets up a leech behind his hand, shuffles the tissue samples on the other side, and prods the soft body to move. It climbs his hand and, with only a little hesitation, slides down the other side towards the diseased samples, where it nibbles at the grey edges.

The high collar of his jacket doesn’t fully hide Shino’s smile. Sakura perks up and grips his shoulder, grinning.

“Hey, finally!” she crows. She leans forward to look over Shino’s arm, a stray strand of hair settling on his opposite shoulder, and watches the leech feed on the sample. “You think it can train the others pretty easily?”

“That may be up to luck.” Extracting himself from Sakura, Shino moves the clean samples to the shelf above his desk, leaving the leech’s dinner alone. “Though I do have faith in her abilities.”

Sakura watches the window for a minute; the sun is low in the sky, hanging at the infinite point of afternoon. Moving away from the desk, Shino’s hair glows warm and brown in the light, his face decorated with the smallest celebration she’s ever seen.

“Hey, let’s do dinner tonight,” she offers.

He turns to watch her, studious as ever, examining the thick muscles of her calves and her tense biceps as she leaps to her feet, fists clenched. “It’s a Friday, and your leeches made so much progress, and it’s… well, it’s gonna be nice out tonight, according to the forecast, and…” Her feet shuffle together and in an instant she’s the picture of a shy schoolgirl, that gung-ho posture forgotten. “Well, let’s go somewhere nice tonight. My treat.”

Shino tugs at the collar of his jacket, hiding a growing smile behind starched fabric. “I’d enjoy that.”

* * *

 

Every day on her trip home, Sakura passes a tiny restaurant settled in the middle of a beautiful shade garden. Kaiseki, reads the sign, hand-painted in gold-leaf paint on a birch plank. Doubtful that it’s a true kaiseki, but the aromas are always enticing. 

It’s expensive. The couples who go in—and they’re always couples—dress in formalwear, suits and yukatas and kimonos and sometimes Sunan robes and Kirish jackets for the ambassadors. She’s had more than one dream where she stands on the doorstep in the rain, watching little water droplets fall down Sasuke’s hair as he holds out an umbrella just for her, so chivalrous of him to get his good suit drenched, and then she’d lean forward to press close to those pouty lips… what an image for a first date, when that day finally comes.

Well. A different first date beforehand won’t hurt.

(Is it a date?)

Sakura tells herself that maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, depending on how it goes and whether or not Sasuke sends her that letter anytime soon, but each step of dressing in her favorite summer yukata brings her closer to doubt. Would she put her hair up like this for Naruto and Sai, even at the same restaurant? Would she even bother to ask Ino to join her at such a nice venue? Would her mother still give her That Look if she were helping her tie an obi for a festival?

Outside her front door, her stomach churns uneasily; she glances around for the hawk she knows won’t come, as if Sasuke knows what she’s about to do (or not do, or maybe do). More than a little nervous, more than a little anxious, strong emotions bunched into a pretty cream fabric with delicate flower printing; she tries to think positive thoughts on her way back to the hospital gates.

Shino is wearing a yukata, too. 

Gods, this must be a date.

“Shino, hi,” she calls from the street. He’s leaning against a fencepost, hands in the pockets of his charcoal-grey robe, looking far more exposed than usual. A stripe of pink illuminates his throat, the peaks of his jawbones, his cheeks, the tip of his nose—out of his element, poor boy. “You ready? The kaiseki place isn’t too far away.”

“I doubt it’s real kaiseki,” he comments. “The reason being that it’s in the city center.”

“Well, sure,” Sakura mutters, “but it still seems like a nice restaurant.” She nudges him with an elbow and giggles at the resulting stagger. “Let’s go.”

With a clatter of wood-and-straw sandals and the swish of thick fabric, she bursts ahead of him down the road, then turns back with arms folded behind her. The motion feels childish and out-of-place, but it draws a smile from Shino, who strides quickly to meet her.

The route is blessedly short to the restaurant, and nobody is around to hear Sakura, heart in her throat, making stilted, one-sided conversation. She makes observations about streets that she’s certain Shino’s familiar with, comments about his yukata as if she knows the first thing about clothes, catalogues her high hopes for the kaiseki in a bid to seem cultured. All the time he remains silent, face impassive as the sheen of embarrassment grows on her cheeks. 

Outside the restaurant, she grips her hands into fists, looking up seriously at the doorframe and taking in the imposing aura of an evening that she can barely afford. “Alright, Shino, let’s—”

His hand falls on her shoulder quite suddenly, and she jolts out of her anxious trance.

“Sakura,” he murmurs. “I don’t know anything about kaiseki.”

“Oh! W-well, that’s—”

“Or fashion. Or dating. And to be honest, I barely know how to talk to people for an extended period of time.” His face is serious and drawn.

Sakura blinks and watches his jaw tighten. “... a-and?”

“I’m very glad to be here.” A pause. “Shall we go in?”

He gently moves past her and pushes the heavy door open, leaving Sakura standing on the doorstep. With a shiver, she claps her hands to her face, trying to absorb the heat. 

Certainly no Sasuke, that man.

She enters the tiny restaurant with a hiss of anticipation.

* * *

 

The hostess foregoes the sake with their first course, but offers a strong tea instead. It seeps into Sakura’s bones and makes her relax into the soft cushions surrounding their low table; she’s so distracted by the flavor and scent of the brew that she nearly misses Shino’s glasses clinking gently against the table.

With a snap, she looks up and catches only the quickest glimpse of his face before her upset tea, leaping from her cup to her hands, burns her. She cries out and sets the cup aside, groping for a cloth to clean the mess with. 

“You—” she chokes, mopping at her hands, “why’d you take your glasses off?”

Shino turns away to call for more cloth; Sakura swears a little at her vantage point, which hides his eyes behind a shoulder. “My glasses would have seemed out of place here,” he says. “And I believe you wanted me to take them off sometime, too.”

The pain in her hands ebbs away, and she focuses on cleaning the table instead. “Well, I did, but… are you sure you want to?”

He turns, and she watches the low light reflect on his eyes. True to his words, they’re brown with short, dark lashes, but he failed to mention the sharpness of the outside corners and the deep shadow under his lids and the intelligent, attentive sparkle, maybe only a figment of her imagination but maybe, possibly, real. 

Her imagined version of Shino, the one who didn’t accost her at the door with his shortcomings, smiles and tells her that he wanted to show her his face. The real version only looks away with a bashful (and, if she’s being honest, quite unflattering) expression before accepting more cloth napkins for her spilled tea.

She avoids bothering him about the glasses, instead taking little moments to admire his bare face between bits of the horsehair crab appetizer and the house version of miso, rather thick but delicious anyway. A dish of summer sprouts comes out and they swap stories of childhoods in the woods, looking for fiddlehead ferns and butterflies. By the time a roasted skipjack tuna arrives they’re enthralled in less-than-romantic tales of tree-climbing and flower-picking and, on more than one occasion, flower-eating; she’s never seen Shino laugh so hard, but he can barely eat the main course for giggles. It’s an unattractive sound, choked and too fast and strangely quiet. It’s endearing. 

The rice and desserts come out together. Some fake-high-class part of her mind says that it’s wrong to see brown sugar syrup treats so close to clay-pot rice, but it doesn’t matter. Maybe the restaurant wants them to leave earlier, considering how loud she laughs at every tale of bugs not caught. 

Shino’s table manners leave something to be desired. He passes food to her by shoving tableware out of the way. When he pours the after-dinner green tea, he spills some on the table. Sakura finds a bit of unmixed matcha powder in her cup. 

And afterwards, when they step out to find a steady, warm rain, he has no jacket or umbrella to offer her, no romantic gestures that preserve her dignity at cost to himself. They walk home equally drenched, still laughing.

Sakura guides him by the elbow down civilian streets, pointing out houses with shinobi residents and the places where shopkeepers live. Here’s a two-story where a respected jonin makes her home, wedged between two homes with young shinobi still in the academy, surrounded by entire blocks of civilians, soft-handed and soft-bellied and, as she claims, tough as nails in their own very specific way. There’s a razor-narrow spite house that’s stood empty for years, and if it would only go to market she’d move in instantly.

She leads him by the hand up the steps to her front door and reaches up to ruffle rainwater from his hair. “You know,” she says, “I’m glad you took the glasses off.” With a surge of bravery, she reaches up to touch his cheek, cool and pockmarked from an adolescence not long gone. “You’re not as pretty as some other people, but you’re more than your appearances.”

Shino scowls and pulls away; suddenly, she recognizes a deep hurt in the folds of his mouth, so obvious without his eyes hidden. “Please don’t be rude,” he grits.

“I—” Sakura’s voice falters in her throat. “I didn’t mean—remember what you said about the beetles? That was—”

“—I’ll see you on Monday,” Shino says. He turns quickly and vanishes into the dark, shoulders slumped. A hand reaches into his pocket, then up to his face, and she knows that the glasses hide his eyes for the rest of his walk home.

* * *

 

_ What is romance? _ , she asks the book on her pillow.  _ Red Sun Chronicle _ does not respond. What is love, what are romantic things to say, ways to show that you’ve been listening and remembering and thinking about someone?

_ Where is Sasuke? _ , she asks. Again,  _ Red Sun Chronicle _ does not respond, but its answer is clear: it doesn’t matter. Sasuke was a figment, maybe, an amalgam of heroes from every romance novel she’s ever read. That’s comforting, knowing she never twisted a real person beyond his limits. How nice.

She wants to ask something about Shino, but she can’t think of a question to give. As usual,  _ Red Sun Chronicle _ doesn’t help her.

Stupid complicated book. She throws it to the ground and falls asleep before her head hits the pillow.


	5. Hyaline

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hyaline: having a glassy, translucent appearance.

“I’m sorry,” she announces to the room.

Shino turns his head to look at her, cupping his palm over a leech-in-training to hold it still. “This is about Friday night, correct?” It’s a wonder how well those glasses hide his expression, though nothing hides the pause in his voice. “I forgive you. That’s because it was probably a slip of the tongue.”

“Right,” Sakura mutters, “A slip of the tongue.” 

The bile that rises in her throat threatens to seep into her vocal cords:  _ no, I meant to say it, it just didn’t sound how I wanted to _ . How do you explain that? She filled the back of an old school notebook, over the weekend, with explanations for the “not pretty” phrase and never quite figured out herself what she meant—how would she even begin telling that to Shino?

So instead of coming clean, she makes good practice of stilling her quaking hands and sits next to Shino at his desk.

“The kids are coming along,” she comments. “This one won’t bite me if I touch it, right?”

“Kids?” Shino lifts his hand to look at the leech. “...It should be alright to touch. She’s fairly docile.”

Sakura presses her fingertips into the leech’s back. It feels like a smaller version of Katsuyu, soft and plush, though she has a hard time seeing this thing as innocuous. “They’re kind of growing on me,” she admits. “Just like the beetles did.”

The leech writhes under Sakura’s fingers, reaches back and nudges its head against her fingers.  _ He was right _ , Sakura thinks, _ it is docile _ : it doesn’t even attempt to bite her. She lets it creep into her hand and curl up in her palm, swallowing down her initial revulsion.

“You’re not alright,” Shino tells her.

“But I—”

“I won’t press.” Shino reaches out to take the leech from her. “But it’s obvious that you aren’t alright. You are acting differently.” The leech goes back into a tank with her siblings, all clumped over their food dish, and Shino stands up slowly. “I am not angry with you. Please take your time, and come find me when you want to have lunch.”

Sakura, brows furrowed, eyes glued to the desk, feels a warm hand on her shoulder. It lingers for a minute, gentle, a fingertip brushing against the skin of her bicep before Shino turns to leave. 

Deep breaths. 

Why is it that a crisis and a non-issue feel the same?

* * *

 

“So then, the lead character, the woman, she chases after him in the rain and says exactly what she thinks about their whole relationship until that time. And I think it’s so brave, you know?” Sakura taps her fingers against her memo pad and watches as her pen roll off the side, upsetting a little crowd of beetles munching on lunchtime leftovers. “Chasing what you want most and saying what you need to say… I wish I could do that.” Thoughtfully, her fingernail traces the rim of a teacup. 

“Most of our classmates would say that you’re brave, Sakura.” Shino clasps his hands together at his knees and breathes deeply, slowly, calm in a mid-day work-break fashion; he’s wasting time in her office, Sakura knows, but she appreciates the company all the same.

When she finally came to find him, her eyes were rimmed in a pale red, but her smile had returned. She had questions: about the leeches, about what Shino thought of the vacation scene in  _ Red Sun Chronicle _ , the book of hers that this scene reminded her of, how the new beetles were doing. But under that facade of questioning, normalcy, happiness: a heaviness. He ignored it.

And Sakura’s a good actor, he noted. By the time the two made their way out of the radiology lab, down the road, through the convenience store and back into Sakura’s office, he’d actually forgotten that leaden feeling she gave off. Even now.

Back in reality, she giggles and scoops up the beetles, waiting for a hand to place them in. “Maybe it seems like that to you, but I don’t feel all that brave. I’m working on it, though.” Reluctant, the beetles crawl into Shino’s outstretched hand, and she admires the way light reflects on their tiny shells. “Would you want to borrow it? It’s a pretty short read. Promise.”

“I would enjoy that.” He watches the beetles that run circles on his palm before vanishing back into his sleeve. 

Finally, she smiles broad and glittering for the first time all day. “I’ll bring it for you tomorrow, then,” Sakura replies. “It’s not as complex as  _ Red Sun Chronicle _ , but I promise it’s really good—all the characters are well developed, and the world’s really believable, and…” She turns her head to the window as if distracted by a noise before looking back at her half-empty teacup. “... it’s just a really good read. Did you hear that?”

“I think it was a hawk.” Shino stands and moves to the windowsill, reaching for the latch. “Were you expecting test results, maybe?”

Sakura turns in her chair to watch him. “I haven’t sent anything off lately…” Suddenly, she perks up, nearly leaping from her seat. “Ah! Maybe it’s from Sasuke!”

“Please don’t get your hopes up, Sakura.” With a smooth swing, Shino opens the window and pushes the curtains aside. “It wouldn’t be good for you to be so sad today.”

But the bird that lands on the sill is a dark, sleek thing, suited for international flights, sharp and intelligent. In its beak it carries a thin paper sleeve, deep red and rumpled from travel. Sakura sucks in a quick breath and stretches a hesitant hand out to meet it, barely believing its reality.

The bird avoids her touch, but deposits the paper sleeve on the sill, then hops aside as if waiting for an order. Shino takes the paper and glances it over; it’s wafer thin, light rice paper.

It’s addressed to Sakura.

She grabs it out of his hands just as he reads the address. No return delivery. Maybe not even an instruction for the bird. Mysterious, untraceable. Not a note to be responded to. Even as she gleefully pops the seal open, Shino’s stomach churns uneasily. 

“It is! He did write!” she cries. “How rude, Sasuke, it’s been so long since I heard from you! Shino, do you wanna hear what he said?” Too late; she unfolds the paper and snaps it straight, clearing her throat to read. “‘Dear Sakura,’” she reads, “‘I’m doing well. Tell Naruto to stop leaving messages for me. It’s annoying.’”

Sakura pauses, and her brows furrow in confusion as she fidgets with the corner of the page. “Is this the only sheet? There’s not… Ah, m—‘my travels took me through Rain country. I liked it, but I doubt anyone else would. Still no sign of my goal. Signed, Sasuke.’”

The hawk clicks its beak and turns, hopping out the window and setting course for the aviary. It leaves behind a piece of dry grass on the sill, crumbling. Shino peeks over her shoulder; true, it’s a single page, written carelessly by a man obviously in a hurry. 

“Is this really all he had to say?” Sakura whimpers. She turns the paper over and feels around for folds. “It’s… w-well, at least he thought of me enough to send a letter…”

“Sakura.”

She doesn’t bother looking at Shino. For a long moment, she hisses thin breaths through her teeth. Her fingernails punch tiny crescent-moon holes in the paper, creating ridges that connect her hands together. 

“No, you’re… you’re right, Shino. He didn’t.” She pauses. “He doesn’t care.” 

Shino watches her face as tears prickle in the corners of her eyes. Her shoulders slump gently, perfect places to set comforting hands, forehead bowed to accept the press of another. No comfort comes. 

“I’ll…” Sakura sniffles, rubs at her eyes with the palm of one hand. “I’m going to go back to work, okay? I need to…”

“Should I come with you?”

Her head sways slowly, and she crumples the letter into a ball. “I’ll be alright. Just… I’ll be in the radiology lab if you need me, Shino.” The letter crinkles softly as she shoves it into her pocket; his beetles scurry away from her leaden hands when she reaches for the memo pad and pen. 

He doesn’t see any tears falling as she leaves, but the kikaichu smell salt. Sakura exits her office and wanders away down the hall (the wrong direction for the radiology lab, Shino notes).

Ryusuke, with his little white spot in the center of his shell, climbs out to his fingertip to inspect his master’s face. Under the sunglasses, Shino’s eyes crinkle, concerned, confused, and the corners of his mouth tighten. “Do you think I should follow her?” he asks the beetle. “Should I have held her, or said something?”

The beetle says nothing.

Shino stares out the window, watching the hawk, now a dot in the distance, until it vanishes behind an apartment block. A breeze that stinks of stale cooking oil floats in and tosses the cheap linen curtain over a spare office chair. “You’re right,” he murmurs. “I’ll give her time.”

* * *

 

Shino leaves work in the golden hour, shadowless and glimmering, attended by leaves in their last unfurled glories for the day. A fresh troupe of kikaichu ride on the peaks of his hair, watching the sunset city with baby wonder. He mourns the last batch—short-lived friends and dear comrades—but watching these children wander aimlessly on his forearms, taking in the dying light for the first and probably last time… nothing, he thinks, can be better.

So lost in thought, he almost misses the gentle sobs coming from the abandoned lot garden. A beetle turns its antennae to the noise; he feels the gentle motion it makes in his hair as it climbs towards the sound. Muffled by the thick young butterfly bushes, lingering on the sound of rustling leaves, but it’s certainly there: a girl, crying.

Come to think of it, Sakura wasn’t in her office. Or the radiology lab. Shino balls his hands into fists and shoves them in his pockets, takes a deep breath and enters the garden.

He finds her just as distant thunder drowns out her sobs. Sakura looks uncharacteristically small, curled up with her knees to her chest, hidden in the shade of a bush in full bloom. Shino tries a hundred different phrases in his head, but they all die on his lips. All he can think to do is sit beside her.

Like it’s normal, like it’s been done before, she coils against his side, fitting her angles into the empty spaces around his thin arms. Her left hand slides into his right, her hair under his left; automatically, her fingers wander through the smooth, loose locks, and she shuts her eyes tight. “It’s funny,” she says. “All those novels say that love makes you feel better. You always feel good when you’re with the person you want.”

Shino remains silent for a long moment, watching the gentle curve of a lock of hair as it slides across his palm. After a hesitant moment, he lets her hair fall back into place and reaches for his glasses. “Maybe it isn’t love,” he replies finally. The glasses, folded, clatter softly on the grass.

Sakura sighs and leans her temple against his shoulder. “Maybe. Or maybe that’s just not what love is meant to do.”

Gentle rain drums against the broad leaves of the tree; runaway droplets slide through the canopy to land on their shoulders, hair, shirts. Salt-tear-stained fabric clings to Shino’s shoulder, though he never asks Sakura to move. Until the rain ebbs away, until Sakura runs out of tears and until her weak grip relaxes on his hand, they sit in a drowsy silence, two very similar people lost in two very different contemplations.

No words are exchanged after Sakura’s tears dry. She wordlessly hands back his glasses, accepts the gentle pat to her slumped shoulder and shuffles home with her arms around her stomach.

In the weeks to come, Shino wonders if walking her home could have changed everything. It wouldn’t. But he wonders still.

* * *

 

Dear Mama,

By the time you find this letter, I’ll already be gone. It’s nothing you did, and it’s nothing Papa did. Please don’t call anyone or send someone after me. Lady Tsunade will know where I am.

Sasuke, that other boy in my three-man-cell, sent me a letter today. That’s why I came home crying. He sent me a letter after months and he said nothing about missing me or thinking about me or caring at all how I’ve been these past few months. It was easy while he was gone to imagine that he’d been pining after me all this time, but I can’t ignore it anymore: the Sasuke I wanted wasn’t the one that I actually knew.

Mama, it’s been so long since I did anything for myself. Ever since I was in the Academy, I wanted to succeed to impress Sasuke. I wanted to keep up with Naruto’s progress so Sasuke would like me. The only thing I’ve done for myself lately has been to follow in Lady Tsunade’s footsteps, and to spend time with Shino. Both of those things are wonderful, but neither is enough.

I’m going to spend some time with myself. I don’t know what to do, or where to go, or what to think, but I’m determined to figure that out on my own. I’m going to do things because of and for the person who matters most. I’ve been neglecting her for too long.

It won’t make everything better. I never told you, but I wake up some mornings wanting to cry. Other times I feel so sad that I can’t move. Those things won’t change. But I hope if I find out about myself I’ll be able to stop feeling sad for so long. I don’t want to be cured; I just want to write my own treatment plan.

Tell Papa that I love him and that I’ll miss him. I’ll miss you too, of course. And when I come home, let’s sit down and eat together like a family. 

Love, Sakura.

* * *

 

Shino,

I’m going to leave the village for a little bit. Before you ask, I’m not looking for Sasuke. I’m going for my own sake.

I know you don’t like being abandoned; we’re the same, in that way. And I’m sorry, but this is something I think I need to do. I’ll send you letters, and I know I’ll think about you. Promise.

Please take care of the garden by the hospital. I have a lot of good memories there.

Sakura.

* * *

 

She packs everything she owns: dresses carefully rolled up and tucked into athletic shorts, with underwear carefully slotted in the spaces between, spare shoes folded tight and wrapped up, spare books and extra blankets and snacks and water purification tablets and tools. 

Then she dumps the whole bag on her floor and tries again.

Three dresses, her favorites. Just the shoes she came home in. Water tablets and a good knife, the one her parents ordered from the capital city smith when she was promoted to chunin. Shino’s copy of the  _ Red Sun Chronicle _ . Money. For her mother’s sake, she tucks the rest of the clothes back into her closet and spreads the blanket on the bed before she leaves.

The canvas rucksack is lighter than she expected against her back, and more than a little itchy. But it’s freeing, loose and uneven in a way she’s not used to, picking up dew from every tree she passes under. It feels like, for once, being not a shinobi, not a girl in love, not a medic. Just Sakura.

She passes the hospital before leaving town, slips her keys under the front door. It’s early, too early, the sky a hazy, uncertain blue, apologetic for the hour. The butterfly bushes begin to open their leaves. She plucks a cluster of blush-pink flowers and tucks them behind her ear as she leaves.


	6. Migratory Pattern

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Migrate: (of an animal, typically a bird or fish) move from one region or habitat to another, especially regularly according to the seasons. (of a person) Move from one area or country to settle in another, especially in search of work. Move from one specific part of something to another.

Dear Shino:

In Kumogakure it’s still spring. I’m not quite sure how; it really shouldn’t be, considering where it is in relation to Konoha and the ocean and the climate and all. But it’s spring, somehow, and I got to watch the cherry blossoms last night. There’s a photo of them on this postcard. It was the prettiest I could find, but it’s really not enough. You sort of have to see it for yourself.

Let’s watch them together one day. In Konoha, and in Kumogakure.

Sakura.

* * *

 

Shino,

Today it’s Saturday and all the stores are closed so I can’t do any work or get any shopping done or even just window shop because everyone in this town has curtains on their stores as if they don’t want me to buy anything (with all the money I don’t have). So I’m writing to you.

Let’s see. I think I forgot to send you something from northern Fire country—was the last thing I sent you Kumogakure? I might have missed a few towns. Here goes nothing:

I passed through Tanzaku Quarters three days after I left town. This whole trip has been a little slow, but I’m not in any hurry. Lady Tsunade’s hawk caught up with me north of the city and I took a short mission at a border town before I left Fire country for good.

Have you ever seen the northern border of Fire country? I left through the Hot Water border crossing—it’s a mountain pass, only wide enough for one person to cross at a time. The minute you pass through their civilian border station, they hand you a fluffy towel from the city down the slope so you can take a hot bath as soon as you get down the mountain. 

(And I did. The Land of Hot Water doesn’t fool around with their springs.)

But the second I left, I felt… weightless? I don’t know how to explain it to you, but I’ve never felt so loose and free. I miss Konoha, and I do want to come back, but I’m not in a hurry: leaving the country with very little to do but travel and see the world… it’s been wonderful.

After the hot springs tour of Hot Water country (did you know most inns let you have a free bath  _ and _ dinner  _ and _ a room for the night if you do a little yardwork for them?), I passed through Frost country, along the southern coast. No use going to Shimogakure: I hear the Frost daimyo is just awful.

From there I entered Lightning country sometime around midnight, about two weeks before this letter. Kumogakure was the first place I went, naturally; I got to work out at the Kage’s offices, which was a nice change of pace from waking up late and wandering slowly up and down the mountains.

This week I’m in a little village north of Kumogakure. Lots of the people here are older, so I’ve been doing eye examinations and moving tree limbs and repairing carts for food. 

But it’s too long in one town, you know? I think I’ll leave after this evening’s over.

Yours,

Sakura.

* * *

 

Shino, my friend:

I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply in my last letter that I was only writing you because I was bored. The truth is that I’ve been wanting to write for quite some time, but I never get a good chance to sit down and do it. I don’t like rushing my letters to you.

Maybe you’d appreciate shorter letters, though? I don’t know. I’ll try a few. We’ll see.

I hope my garden’s doing well. The weather’s been nice here and all the flowers are blooming. It makes me think of home.

Sakura.

* * *

 

It’s the middle of the night and I can’t stop crying and I don’t know what to do. I took this trip so I could feel better, but I don’t feel better. I’m better in the daytime, but the sadness doesn’t go away at night. 

I miss Sasuke.

I miss you more.

Sakura.

* * *

 

Dear Shino,

Please disregard that last letter. Really, I’m fine.

Lately I do feel a lot better. Even though I don’t have anything to do, I wake up feeling energized. Mostly.

Some days, though, I don’t get up until noon and I cry for a few hours, but that’s not important.

Overall, I feel good. The weather’s been really nice, too, so I went back south (ship fare to the Land of Waves is surprisingly cheap). I put a dried flower from the coast in the envelope; hope it makes the trip.

Miss you,

Sakura.

* * *

 

Dearest friend:

(That’s what the post office lady insisted I call you.)

Am well in the Land of Water. Not as bad here as I thought it would be. Take a look at the waterfall on the front of this card—pretty, isn’t it?   


Talk soon,

Sakura.

* * *

 

Shino, Shino, Shhhhino,

The land of bears has goooood beer. U should try it.

Saku-rama!

* * *

 

Shino:

I’m so sorry I sent you that last postcard. I tried to catch the post carrier but he’s really quick. 

Anyway, as an apology, here’s a little book I found in Hoshigakure. I got it used, so it’s really worn out on the edges, but I liked it a lot and I thought you would, too. It’s like  _ Red Sun Chronicle _ , except happier. I marked a couple of my favorite passages.

Best wishes,

Sakura

P.S. Apparently the drinking age is a lot lower in the Land of Bears.

* * *

 

Shino,

Greetings from western Fire country! I’m close to home. It feels so nice here. Late summer’s always been my favorite season. 

I can’t wait to see what the village looks like. I know it’s got to be just about the same, but some of the little stuff will have changed. Let’s explore and see where the changes are.

See you soon,

Sakura.


	7. Apitherapy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Apitherapy: the use of products derived from bees as medicine, including venom, honey, pollen, and royal jelly.

A late raindrop slides down one of the waxy green leaves that now flank the entrance to the once-abandoned lot. Beyond, bushes grow thick with pink and purple flowers, attended by butterflies of every species: jet black swallowtails with iridescent blue accents, regal orange visitors deep in pollen cups, brilliant yellow flashes, tiny and delicate and almost out of place in the dreary midmorning haze. They flutter in and out of plants, carrying away breakfasts that cling to their feet, dancing in circles around a grey form that fits neatly into the flora.

In his hands, a simple tin watering can. His glasses are nowhere to be seen. Deep brown eyes reflect infinite colourful wings. 

From the gate, Sakura watches him tend to the flowers. She takes catalogue of her her thoughts and worries, then dismisses them with a gentle sigh. 

“Shino,” she murmurs. 

And she giggles; Shino nearly drops the watering can. The butterflies retreat to the bushes far from them, hiding in leaves and petals. “I'm sorry, I'm sorry,” Sakura coos, “I didn't mean to spook you.”

“You're here,” he replies. 

“I'm here. Come sit with me?”

* * *

 

They don’t sit. They wander, hands touching intermittently, to a cafe for some warm paper cups full of smoky tea, then around town while Sakura looks at the subtle changes. Different flowers in windowboxes. Shopkeepers in light jackets. Children looking over textbooks, thumbing through the first few pages of  _ Introduction to Shinobi Codes _ and  _ Mental Mathematics _ and  _ Geography of the Five Great Nations _ .

Shino guides her back to the garden when their tea runs out. He touches thick, healthy branches of flowering bushes like a proud father, frowns and turns away just a little when Sakura thumbs the dying branches that he couldn’t quite save. “It’s okay,” she says, and snaps them off. The bush beneath is healthy. The broken twigs become playgrounds for his beetles.

In the back of the garden, he’s set up a small bench. Clearly it’s hand-built, rough and clumsy but sturdy enough. A weather-beaten, tiny book,  _ From Faded Murals, _ sits open across the back of the bench; Sakura smiles and opens the cover to see her own penmanship:  _ Haruno Sakura, Village Hidden in Stars, summer _ .

“I tried my best,” Shino says. “I am not sure the plants are as healthy as they would have been with you here.” He sits on the far edge of the bench and takes the thin book from her, closing it and folding his hands over the cover image. “Without you around, it has been… a struggle.”

She sits on the opposite end; it’s not clear that her close company is called for yet. “They look just fine to me. Nobody can keep branches from dying.” One of his beetles crawls across the bench towards her, and she accepts it with an open palm. “Be realistic, Shino. You did a great job.”

He doesn’t respond. Sakura looks over to check his face: gentle pink through his ears and into his throat, eyes cast away. His brows curl into tense vees, lips tight. Fingers clenched.

“Shino,” she says. The beetle in her palm scurries in a quick circle. “I’m… really not sorry I left. Overall I think it was necessary.”

His face turns away.

“But, wait—okay, I’m not sorry, but I sort of am at the same time?” She chances a move closer to him; there’s no reaction, so, emboldened, she continues. “Leaving makes me no better than Sasuke, which… is sort of a paradox, I suppose, but I’m really not trying to be better than him or even  _ good enough _ for him anymore. The point is…”

As if an indicator, the beetle opens its wing cases and flutters out of her palm. She reaches out to take one of Shino’s tense hands in hers.

“The point is, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I know how you feel about being forgotten, and I… I really should have considered that more.”

A flock of loons, enjoying the last balmy days of summer, pass overhead. The rustle of their feathers blends into the sound of butterfly bush leaves disturbed by a gentle breeze. Shino’s hand turns over slowly until his fingers lace with Sakura’s.

“I didn’t ask you to be better than anyone,” he says. 

Sakura’s smile lights up the tiny garden.

* * *

 

“So then, in this little town south of Takigakure, they asked me to plant a flowerbed around their village gate. Some of the elders helped me out, but I mostly asked them to run errands for me and water plants so they didn’t have to kneel down all the time. And the flowers they brought for me… Shino, you should have seen them! All shades of blue, and they organized them so the beds faded into white when you leave the town… Ah.” Sakura sighs and slumps into his side, gripping his hand. “I’ll take you there someday.”

In Shino’s free hand, a pair of beetles play-battle, bowling each other over like tiny wrestlers. The afternoon now wears into a cool evening, winding down as Sakura’s travelogue draws closer to Konoha. “I would love to see it,” he murmurs. “It sounds beautiful.”

She giggles and separates the fighting pair with a fingernail. “It’s not, really. The flowers are nice, but the rest of the place… well, alright, I liked it there. It’s not as pretty as other places, but it’s more than its appearances.”

Sakura feels the stiffening in Shino’s shoulder. “That phrase again,” he mutters.

“That was one of the first things you said to me, you know,” she comments. “When we started hanging out. You told me that about your beetles. And it always stuck with me. Lately I realized that it was because I don’t care as much about beauty as I thought I did.” She frowns. “Traditional beauty, that is. And you’re not unattractive, but… I think I care more about who you are than what you are. Inquisitive and kind and gentle and caring.”

Shino doesn’t look up. His eyes follow the lines of her hands, so Sakura continues. “I know that doesn’t make everything all perfect again, and you aren’t obligated to forgive me for being rude that one day, or for leaving you behind, but—”

“—I want to forgive you.”

“What?”

“I do.” He fixes his eyes on her face for the first time in quite a while. Tears gather in the corners of his eyes; it looks at once completely unlike him and exactly like Sakura expected him to look. “I know you didn’t forget me. That’s because I could read it in your letters. I felt lonely, but… never abandoned. And I hoped you’d say something like that when you came back.”

Sakura sighs in relief and nudges his shoulder. “Of course I didn’t forget you. You’re important to me.” 

Looking much relieved, Shino turns his face away and watches the late butterflies that dance around the flowers. Evening sunshine glows on his high cheekbones and mingles with his eyelashes, turns his hair temporarily into bronze.

“You know,” Sakura murmurs, “you look away a lot now that you’re not wearing your glasses. Are you shy?”

“Please don’t tease me about it.”

“I’m not.” Sakura touches a fingertip to his cheek and comes away with tears. “Just wondering.”

Shino slumps into her, pressing a cheek into the hair that pools on her shoulder. As the sun sets, the butterfly bushes bow towards them, framing both in purple and pink flowers against the gold-light-glowing fence. Sakura looks down at Shino’s face hidden in her hair and, slowly, gently, smiles.

“Shino, could I kiss you?”

He doesn’t respond, but he does sit up. Sakura runs a cool hand along his cheek and leans in.


End file.
